Video card upgrade

[Connoisseur]

I've talked about my desktop's low performance before in these forums, and ended up adding more RAM to see if it would help my digital video quality. My problem has been with capturing quality. The video quality that is captured will look wavy, sort of like looking at the surface of shimmering water... Well, I figured that the culprit is my Celeron 2.4 ghz processor, since my Pentium 4 laptop doesn't have this problem. One solution I tried was to up my desktop RAM from 256 to 768 and no change in quality. My next solution I'm thinking would be to add a decent video card. Any thoughts on whether this can up the quality of the capture, or is a video card not going to affect this?

Regards,
Connoisseur

[Crocuta]

You didn't say what type of video you're capturing, but I'll assume you're capturing from a miniDV camcorder since that's the most common these days. If not, then disregard everything else I say.

Neither your RAM or your video card will directly affect the quality of your capture. DV is a fully digital format and all you're doing is moving the 1s and 0s from the camcorder tape into your computer. I'm not even sure how you'd get wavy lines in a DV transfer since the only thing that could go wrong is dropped frames or lack of transfer altogether. Here are a few things to consider.

1. Just to be complete... You are capturing from your camcorder through the firewire interface and not using the video and audio out, right? If you're not using the firewire interface, then you really must do it that way if you want useable material in your computer. Everything below assumes you're using firewire to transfer your video.

2. The most important thing about capturing DV is making sure your HDD can keep up with the data rate. By today's HDD standards, it's really not all that fast a rate, but remember that your hard disk is effectively a single-tasking device. If it's reading something for your OS, it can't be writing your DV. If it's accessing the application, it can't be writing the DV. So when people have trouble transfering DV, the most common cause is that they're using just one physical drive in their system (doesn't help to have it partitioned into two logical drives... still only one set of drive heads and one channel of information running back to the computer) and are trying to have that drive run the OS, run the application, run the zillions of background tasks that are probably running, and still keep up with the DV transfer. The first thing you should do is get a separate drive to capture and store your video on and put it on the secondary IDE channel. That alone solve 90+% of all DV capture problems. Check out slickdeals.net or bensbargains.net for regular reports of HDDs on sale.

3. Given the wavy line thing, though, it may not be the capture on your desktop but the playback of what you've captured. Have you tried capturing on your laptop, then transferring the file to your desktop and seeing if you still get the wavy behavior? (and vice versa.) I'd be at a loss to explain how that could happen otherwise.

4. Anyway, the answer to your question depends on these two things I've mentioned. If your DV is not transferring well due to the HDD, then the fanciest video card in the world will not help you. You must have the disk thing sorted to transfer DV. But if it turns out that the wavy lines are a playback thing on your desktop, and that DV captured on either computer does that when played back on your desktop, then perhaps a new video card could help.

Best of luck!

[Connoisseur]

Thanks for the reply. Your comments definitely give me a starting point to get to the bottom of it. As you assumed, yes, I am using firewire and transferring from a dv camera. The external hd suggestion is probably a good bet. I need one anyway, because my 40gb is pretty puny for this kind of stuff. I will try your suggestion though with the laptop capture and then sending the file over to my desktop to see if there is some sort of playback problem on the desktop.

Again, thanks for the analysis, truly appreciated.

Regards,
Connoisseur

[Crocuta]

You're sure welcome. I hope you sort it out easily. Once you do you'll be having so much fun you'll soon forget the hassle.

[Jason Dunn]

I just love seeing people help each other like this. :-D

[Connoisseur]

Finally, I got things working up to snuff. Yes, I still have the wavy picture on my screen as I dump the DV to the hard drive from my camera. But after editing and then burning to DVD, the resulting DVD has playback without any waviness in the picture. Strange indeed. Don't know why this is. I guess I'll just have to live with not seeing what the end result quality will really look like until my projects get burned. ...

Now if I can only get my wife to buy me that second hard drive I need... need more Gigs!

Regards,
Connoisseur

[Lday]

I've always found it easier to get forgiveness than permission!